The Two Tasks

Ralph Winter’s 12 “Frontiers of Perspective” represent major shifts in his thinking that “profoundly modified and molded his perception of the mission task”:

(1) Unreached Peoples

(2) The Great Commission and Abraham

(3) From the Unfinished Task to the Finishable Task

(4) Failure with the Large Groups and the Off-setting Trend to “Radical Contextualization”

(5) Reverse Contextualization, the Recontextualization of Our Own Tradition

(6) The Reclaiming of the Gospel of the Kingdom

(7) Beyond Christianity

(8) A Different Type of Recruitment

(9) A Trojan Horse

(10) Needed: a Revolution in Pastoral Training

(11) The Religion of Science

(12) The Challenge of the Evil One

Malik, Charles. 2000. The Two Tasks. Wheaton: EMIS. 

This address is by a Lebanese statesman and scholar, a devout believer from the Orthodox church, who served as president of the UN Security Council and General Assembly. It was delivered during dedication ceremonies for the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College in September 1980. 

"What could be more wonderful than for a Center named after the greatest Evangelist of our age to aim at achieving, under God and according to God's own pace, the twofold miracle of evangelizing the great universities and intellectualizing the great Evangelical movement? These two things are absolutely impossible, and because they are at the same time absolutely needed, God can make them absolutely possible.

"Every self-defeating attitude stems originally from the  devil, because he is the adversary, the arch0nihilist par excellence. It cannot be willed by the Holy Ghost. Anti-intellectualism is an absolutely self-defeating attitude. Wake up, my friends, wake up: the great universities control the mind of the world. Therefore how can evangelism consider its task accomplished it if leaves the university unevangelized? And how can evangelism evangelize the university if it cannot speak to the university? And how can it speak to the university if it is not itself already intellectualized?"

Ralph Winter's Parallel Thoughts

This address sheds light on Ralph Winter's concerns, expressed in an address to his staff in 1999, called, "The Future of the University." Some excerpts from that talk:

I feel I need to speak very bluntly in terms of what Evangelicals in general must learn in order for their schools (and specificially our university) to become all they need to be. The intended implication is that we ourselves cannot go much further than Evangelicals in general can follow.

Because we are dealing with “studied mediocrity” in many areas of Evangelical life, we’re up against immense cultural resistance. Evangelicals do not understand the nature or the existence of the university tradition. They founded 157 Bible schools, which have only recently become universities. They did not realize the power of culture and the strategy of contextualization within it.

As a result Evangelicals, of course, have not gotten into politics nor into university structures until very recently. How can you go as a professor from a Bible school to a university? You can’t. All the doors have been locked for a hundred years to the other divergent pattern. That was a mission strategy that went wrong, that refused to contextualize.

Evangelicals have until this day (and will perhaps for a long time to come) grossly underestimated the significance of the university pattern. This is a missionary subject….

College as we know it does not allow young people to be integrated into society.

We need to be able to rethink every single facet of our society, including the university, else otherwise we simply have Satan constantly deceiving us, teaching us all kinds of things that aren’t true. Half truths are dangerous! They are harmful!  We have one of the sickest societies in the world in many respects.